


Two Houses She Doesn't Call Home

by gwinne



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 11:05:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13902702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwinne/pseuds/gwinne
Summary: A domestic ficlet.  Post-ep for "This."





	Two Houses She Doesn't Call Home

Those years on the run had changed her. Years living out of suitcases, moving from cheap motel to cheap motel, take out containers open on the desk, all the detritus of everyday life. Mulder had always lived like that, untamed bachelor. Dana Scully, MD, Dana Scully, FBI agent, liked order. She was a woman who had filing cabinets filled with neat notes, and who spent Friday nights reviewing them. When they were home and not on a case in those early days--the innocent years before cancer, before infertility and abduction and miraculous pregnancy--she cleaned. She was a navy captain’s daughter, after all. She liked order. With Mulder--without William--she was someone else. She was a woman who walked into her overturned house and dropped a case file back on the floor. She was a woman who could fall asleep on the couch in a room that had been shot to pieces—there had been corpses in her home (again, she thought) and it no longer fazed her. She had become a new person in that unremarkable house. She had become like Mulder in that unremarkable house. She loved their life together, until she didn’t.

They were, for all practical purposes, married. They also kept two homes. They had been forced into domestic intimacy during those days on the run; their relationship was so new and wonderful and then he’d been taken and brought back and in hiding again. It all happened so fast they never had time to figure out if they wanted to live together before they started living together. The truth was, she hated living with Mulder. Or, more precisely, she hated the person she became when she and Mulder co-habitated. She liked things clean. He thrived in a perpetual state of disarray. So when they were back in the world again, solving X-Files like it was 1998, when they were back to the basement office during the day and, sometimes, having sex again at night, moving back to each other as partners in all senses of the word, she decided to keep her sleek new home; she had a space that was tidy and modern, where she could go and shut out the world.  Until she was ready to convince Mulder it was time to redecorate. This wasn’t how she wanted to be domestic; without their son, none of it really mattered.

**Author's Note:**

> A long time ago I wrote a fic called "Domesticated" that explored, among other things, Scully's new furniture and a desire for motherhood. I was similarly inspired by "This" and "Followers" (don't ask me to type all those seemingly random characters!) in terms of her new domestic situations. (This is my first fic in 15 years. It's good to be back.)


End file.
